Scholarship is substantial and growing on "transitional jus- tice," that is, the legal and political decisions devised by incoming democratizing regimes to address the excesses of outgoing repressive regimes and the harms endured by their victims. Truth commissions are perhaps the most significant, if controversial, innovations in a democratizing regime's toolbox. Their significance is largely derived from their peculiarity. Since the early 1970s, approximately 21 commis- sions have been established in various countries. They have been defined as "bodies set up to investigate a past history of violations of human rights in a particular country-which can include violations by the military or other government forces or by armed opposition forces" (Priscilla Hayner, "Fifteen Truth Commissions-1974 to 1994: A Comparative Study," Human Rights Quarterly 16 [November 1994]: 597-655).

No one will deny John E. Hill's claim that he has written an "unabashedly didactic" book (p. xi). This is not social science, or political theory, or history as it is usually understood by those disciplines. I do not mean that as a criticism, for there is great merit in writing as a concerned citizen-scholar. Hill puts his political cards on the table. He is a self-described "moderate liberal" (p. xi) who wants universal health insur- ance, public funding of elections, more restraints on the corporate sector, a more progressive tax system, more spend- ing on education, and community service programs. He also wants liberals to rethink their attitude toward morality: They need to be more forthright about the importance of morali- ty-social virtue-for the health of the Republic. In addition, Hill does not shy away from telling us that he does not like "individualistic excess" (p. ix), Alexander Hamilton, Ronald Reagan, or the religious Right.

A distinguished political sociologist, Richard F. Hamilton is perhaps best known for Who Voted for Hitler? (1982). More recently his attention has shifted to the broader methodolog- ical issues raised by the empirical claims of sociological macrotheories. This critical study of three versions of Marx- ism-the original statement by Marx and Engels and two rival reformulations, by Eduard Bernstein at the end of the nineteenth century and by Lenin during World War I-is to be seen in the light of this concern.

Modern welfare states offer cash payments, public housing, medical assistance, food subsidies, and a wide range of social services to needy individuals. The assistance is rendered by professional social workers and administrators who have the authority (and responsibility) to determine who is needy, what their needs are, and how those needs can be met equitably and efficiently. This top-down approach is both ineffective and paternalistic, according to Julie Anne White, who advocates a system of care based on democratic delib- eration rather than bureaucratic rationality.

By now most readers have a good deal of familiarity with the Christian Right, the political movement of conservative Protestants that began in the late 1970s and continues to thrive today. The movement has undergone significant changes over the past two decades. Interest groups have risen and fallen, and presidential candidacies (namely, that of Pat Robertson in 1988) have failed. Yet, the Christian Right is still seen by scholars, pundits, and electioneers alike as a political force with which to be reckoned.

Feminist theorists have struggled to develop accounts of women's oppression that are historically specific enough to capture the variability in forms of male domination but do not neglect possible transhistorical and transcultural features. A related challenge has been to theorize a feminist subjec- tivity that can anchor an oppositional politics but avoid an overly unified notion of feminist subjectivity, while neverthe- less attending to the patterned effects that women's system- atic location in the social whole may have on their subjectiv- ity.These challenges were the subject of sometimes polemical but mostly fruitful debates throughout the 1980s and 1990s. They have been deeply shaped by two distinct developments. The first is the political struggles and theoretical writings of women of color, whose work on subjectivity and male dom- ination has consistently pluralized women's subjectivity as well as historicized and contextualized male domination in relation to other axes of power. The second is postmodern critiques that charge modernist modes of theorizing are governed by either ahistorical metanarratives insufficiently attentive to variation and contingency or essentialist under- standings of subjectivity in either a humanist/liberal/volunta- rist or determinist/Marxist form.

With friends like Edwin Meese and Robert Bork, "jurispru- dence of original intent" (p. 3) needs no enemies. These polemicists have so corrupted originalism by associating it with reactionary ideology and partisan politics that, in Keith Whittington's words, "the task now is to convince critics to take [it] seriously again" (p. xii). Constitutional Interpretation ably performs this task. Whittington's rescue of originalist jurisprudence from its strangest bedfellows in itself is a major contribution to the study of constitutional law. But, although originalism has found a genuine friend, the book's powerful argument against "dismissing originalism as an interpretive method" (p. 162) does not constitute an affirmative defense. Whittington's efforts to make this case are informative and provocative, but they fail. This failure is traceable to serious defects in both the structure and content of the book.

Marie Henehan presents a systematic study of every roll call vote on foreign policy taken by the Senate between 1897 and 1984. She predicts an increase in Senate activity and disagree- ment on foreign policy after "the emergence of imperialism as a critical issue in 1897, the crisis over involvement in Europe in 1917, the heightened importance of the response to commu- nism in 1947, and the perceived failure of the containment policy in Vietnam between the Tet Offensive in 1968 and the bombing of Cambodia in 1970" (p. 83). She also predicts a gradual decline in activity as the issue is resolved, but increases following major policy failures related to each critical issue.

Not long ago, Richard Fenno was at an American Political Science Association convention, wondering aloud whether anyone might want to publish a case study of a single congressional district over almost three decades. The Uni- versity of North Carolina Press did, and congressional schol- ars and students of representation are indebted to the editors there. Just when we suspected that Fenno could not wring one more set of insights from his "soaking and poking" political anthropology, he produces a book that tells a profound tale of political change in the South (and in suburbia), gives us a grounded study of what it means to represent a constituency, and offers an understanding of both the Rayburn and Gingrich eras in the House of Representa- tives. In addition, students of Congress can enjoy this book in its nuanced referencing of Home Style, Fenno's still-relevant study of House members in their constituencies, published in 1978.

Carsey presents a sound piece of research planted solidly in two fields: voting behavior and state politics. The primary thrust is testing a model of campaign strategy and voter reaction. Carsey takes advantage, as have many recently, of the steadily accumulating state campaign and exit polling data. Although not nearly as rich as the American National Election Survey (ANES) in content, these data provide reliable state samples and an abundance of cases in each state, which the ANES seldom does. We now often can use the states as true social science laboratories of democracy- expanding N without adding the confounding factors that plague across-time comparisons of national elections.